My first thought was MP3 players.
Was there a time before when they didn’t? Unless you’re a lot older than I think, books were already ubiquitous well before your lifetime.
CDs and DVDs/BluRays are making something of a comeback. They’re more reliable than streaming, and universally portable.
Yup, that’s why I included the Cite above as to the possible resurgence. But note (from the same cite):
Physical media sales declined just 9% in 2025, compared to drops of over 20% in 2023 and 2024, marking a dramatic shift in a shrinking market.
That’s still a substantial decline, just though half that of the previous years. Still, who knows the long term answer.
Bell bottom bluejeans are the first thing that comes to mind for me. Fashion merchandisers have tried bringing them back, but people weren’t buying them.
The used media stores in my area, including the self-service library bookstore I volunteer at, do quite well, although the prices have to be a factor.
Reel to reel tape players were never very popular, AFAIK. They were a little before my time, and Betamax was outside most people’s budgets.
Live peep shows and x-rated porn viewing in private booths used to be common in large cities seedy parts of town. Now we have live streaming of porn on demand.
Mostly the same with prostitutes, the majority has gone online (except for the truely desperate). Many towns dont have red light districts anymore.
Mom and pop antique shops. Every small town in Ohio had one in the 1990s and I loved it. Then the big regional antique malls took over and even a small seller could rent a showcase or floor space. Then eBay killed them all.
Music videos. They were huge for some years but have largely vanished.
But were they not a thing when you were born?
ETA : someone else has commented on that.
Physically rotating billboards. It seemed like they were instantly everywhere at some time in the 90s. They’d have triangular strips that would rotate to show three times as many ads as a single flat billboard.
Now of course those have been replaced by digitally rotating billboards. And I’m sure that the default for new billboards everywhere is digital rather than the manual “get up and paste a printed sign” kind, since they’re much cheaper to update than even a single ad billboard, and probably cheaper to run and maintain than the physically rotating ones. I can see single sign billboards maybe having some use cases here and there, but not physically rotating ones.
I’m not sure which variety of multi-billboard is more annoying, since the manually rotating ones often had a couple broken strips, but the digital ones are too damn bright.
I still see mood jewelry around. It had a small resurgence maybe 15 years ago.
If you predate Sears, you must be much older than me.
So rather than mom and pop antique stores, which have been around forever, wouldn’t it be the regional antique malls that took over then died?
Fotomats, chain bookstores*, Radio Shack.
*like Borders, B.Dalton and Waldenbooks.
Black and white tv. However, I’ve seen it implied that the thing must have not existed while the observer was aware and then became ubiquitous. I’ll have to reread the op because I didn’t read it that way the first time.
Ok, so black and white tv existed when I was a kid. I watched Captain Kangaroo in b and w. Bewitched and Beverly Hillbillies. So I withdraw B and W tv, however it was pretty ubiquitous when I was child, but is now gone.
Just moved from television to online.
I wonder if I just plain haven’t lived long enough for something like this to happen yet. Two things that come to mind are AOL keywords and MP3 players. I know the latter are still produced but I feel like they were largely supplanted by smartphones.
Compact fluorescent light bulbs. First appeared in probably the late 1990s as a more energy efficient alternative to incandescent bulbs. Now they’ve been supplanted by LEDs.
Not sure if they were ubiquitous (at one point there was one round the corner from where I lived), but LAN Gaming facilities were huge for about ten years, until Internet speeds caught up and you could Network online.
On the other hand, Blackberries were not a thing where I am, I don’t remember seeing them at all even in their heyday.
I should have emphasized the ‘keep’ part. In my dad’s college days it seems like people focused on buying used and reselling at the end of the semester, only keeping books that seemed very important for a future career. When I was in college about 20 years ago, there was a lot of emphasis on keeping pretty much everything, because you didn’t know if you would need it later for that all-important P.E. exam. I do remember a point about 10 years ago when it seemed all the books were being replaced with printed packets that you placed in a binder (I had to buy exactly one of these when I was in college; it was a professor’s self-published work). And now people seem to have nothing? I do know that certain professional organizations (ASME, for example) offer online access to loads of books as part of their annual membership fee, so maybe that has replaced a loaded bookshelf for younger people.
Digital cameras that are only cameras. Now every phone is a camera.
Yep, first thing I thought of. Heck, those AOL CDs alone that they used to constantly mail to everybody unsolicited, threatened to blanket the Earth in a shiny layer a foot or so deep, at one time.